Walker not challenging recall signatures

Arguing they have run out of time to review the roughly one million signatures on recall petitions, Governor Scott Walker’s campaign says it will not make any challenges with the state Government Accountability Board.

Walker faced a deadline to file challenges by the end of today, after his campaign was given 30 days to review the petitions. The campaign went to court earlier this month two ask for two more weeks. A Dane County judge rejected the request.

Campaign spokeswoman Ciara Matthews says their review so far has found an error rate of between 10 and 20 percent. That would leave the campaign far short of challenging the nearly half million signatures needed to stop an election. Still, she says “the impossible timeline” has left them without the ability to know that for sure.

Democratic Party of Wisconsin chairman Mike Tate says the claim that they ran out of time is absurd, after the campaign talked about having thousands of volunteers lined up to help review the petitions. Tate says “the gig is up and Scott Walker moaning for all these months was nothing more than trying to distract attention away from his record of failure.”

The campaign will now rely on the Government Accountability Board to verify the petitions. The GAB was ordered by a judge in Waukesha County to check for invalid signatures, fake names, or other potential fraud. Matthews says the campaign has “confidence in the GAB’s ability to look at those signatures and pull any that they find to be questionable.”

The GAB has until March 19th to determine if there are enough valid signatures to order a recall election.